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“Smells Like a B-Minus?”: Surrender Privilege for Transparency

Understanding by Design is an outcomes-based approach to course design whereby an instructor first articulates her most profligate hopes and dreams for her students: what are the enduring understandings about the subject matter that animate her love for the course and which she strives to kindle in her learners? There is a cost to doing it well, sales but it’s a cost many of us are more than happy to pay: we have to surrender the privilege of issuing letter-grades from within the fortress of our privileged Instructor’s Black Box, sovaldi and take up the adult responsibility of making our evaluations processes transparent to learners.

Transparency in assessment is a loaded concept for faculty. Traditionally, we are not accustomed to having our discernment questioned: if it “smells like a B-plus” to us, then that is that. As transparency gains ground–for example, through the use of openly available assessment rubrics–some tension can build up around the loss of faculty privilege associated with this cultural shift. Occasionally, the lubricating norm of collegiality notwithstanding, this tension around transparency and privilege is pushed uncomfortably to the surface in some small, seismic event.

It was faculty training day for a new learning management system, and the vendor representative was teaching instructors to use the “grade book” function. Several faculty members protested that the software required them to enter numerical evaluations for student assignments. “But how do I simply put in a B-plus for an assignment? I don’t use numbers!”

The vendor addressed one of the complainants: “Look, let’s say that you assign a student an ‘A’ on a paper that is 20 percent of their grade, a ‘B-minus,’ a ‘B-plus,’ and a ‘C’ on three quizzes that total 50 percent of their grade, and an A-minus on a final paper that is 30 percent of their grade. How will you combine those letter grades in order to calculate that student’s final grade?”

“Intuitively,” answered the instructor.

Understanding by Design is, in its orgins, oriented toward K–12 learning environments, where accountability in assessments and evaluations is largely a “done deal.” Particularly in public schools, standards are handed down to teachers from on high, and a large part of one’s time is devoted to keeping up on assessments and evaluations generated by a process transparent to one’s supervisors. In higher education generally, and in private higher ed especially, instructors tend to enjoy greater autonomy. Federal and state standards of accountability in grading exist, particularly for public colleges and universities, but also for the private schools, including stand-alone seminaries. Schools are also accountable to their accrediting agencies, who will want to see that institutional claims about assessment practices will match what is actually found in professor feedback and in the grade books. Nonetheless, in practice, the instructor in higher education–particularly the tenured professor, and particularly at the private institution–remains, in the grading process, largely master of her own domain.

Perhaps it seems paradoxical, then, that grading proves to be the third rail of higher education. We enjoy complaining about the burdensome nature of the process. But all the noise about “grading hell” sometimes masks a conspicuous silence about process. Knowledge is power, and (so the fear goes) the more a learner knows about how the grade is made, the more leverage they have to “grade grub” for a boost. When you’re afraid, the instinct is to cover up. Better (so the fear says) to simply proclaim from the autonomy implicit in our expertise, “It feels to me more like a B-minus than a B.” I would like to challenge this fear-based thinking, arguing that transparency is the stronger, even safer, choice.

I teach Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, largely to first-term seminarians. This means that my introductory course is a “gate-keeping course”: I fail more students than do those instructors whose courses include mine as a prerequisite. (Put more simply: many of my colleagues only see the students who first pass my course.) Most of my students are, obviously, persons of religious faith; a substantive minority have ideological objections to the course material, and many have at least some emotional adjustment to make in response to the course. Furthermore, my first eight years or so of “Intro” semesters I taught as an adjunct instructor, without even the protections of a long-term contract, to say nothing of tenure. (About 3/4 of instructional positions in higher education are non- tenure-track; about half of instructors are part time employees.) This is all to say, “Old Testament/Hebrew Bible” is a controversial course, prone to make many learners dissatisfied, and taught by an increasingly vulnerable teaching staff of at-will employees.

During my “adjunct years,” transparency was my best friend. At some time during almost every year, a student (with or without having first spoken with me) would protest a grade to the office of the academic dean. This would sometimes include a self-justifying admonition that the school shouldn’t be entrusting adjunct faculty with required courses. On such occasions, it was for me a matter of, if not life and death, at least potentially employment or unemployment, that I could demonstrate (1) that the student’s evaluation was calculated from numbers rather than from whim, and (2) that the rubrics for such calculations were available to the student while she or he was undertaking the work. If I were to have said, in that situation, that I calculated final grades “intuitively,” I would probably (and justifiably) have ceased to be invited to teach courses at that school.

So, for the “contingent” instructor, transparency in assessments and evaluations is a life preserver, a DIY defense attorney. But what about the shrinking but persistent set of faculty members protected by tenure? I would put it briefly but (I admit) astringently: in biblical studies, in religious studies, or even the humanities generally, it is rare these days to find a teacher who does not instruct her learners that in this postmodern age, we know that “objectivity” is a chimera and that no person can stand outside herself and perceive her own biases. I encourage that instructor to write those words on an index card and affix it to the ceiling of her office, so that she will see them the next time she strokes her chin over a grade book and peers abstractly to the heavens to generate a student’s final grade “intuitively.”

[A version of this article appears in Understanding Bible by Design: Create Courses with Purpose.]

Brooke Lester, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor in Hebrew Bible and Director for Emerging Pedagogies, at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary (Evanston IL). He received his degree in Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.

We are pleased that Brooke has agreed to serve as Seminarium’s curator, because – in his own words – I am an instructor who has “discovered” the scholarship of teaching and learning, and who talks about it with something of the fanaticism of the convert.

Brooke writes: There is a famous curse about being doomed to live “in exciting times,” and it’s not always fun to be living through the greatest upheaval in literacy since Gutenberg (or possibly since the dawn of writing), but, well…here we are!

My favorite thing about “digital learning” is that the stakes are in fact as high as we think they are: the digitization of language makes us talk together about how we really think learning happens, and then it makes us reconsider almost everything we think we know about that.

More insight into Brooke’s pedagogical “reconsiderings” can be found on his personal blog: http://www.anumma.com.

About Brooke Lester

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